The highs and lows of my own automotive/bike/gadget ownership by me (John Oldfield)
Previously it documents life with a
Fiat Coupe 20VT (up to 08/10/04)
Mini Cooper S (08/10/04 to 20/02/2006)
Honda CBR600RR (May 2005 to Feb2006)BMW M3 E46 (March 2006 to Aug2007) and is now recording my time
with a Volkswagen Golf GTI Edition 30 (Nov 07 on)
and a little bit of science and gadget tech thrown in too...

Saturday, 30 April 2011

Thursday, 28 April 2011

not so many moons ago, I ventured into the Android stream with the Galaxy i7500.
Needless to say that became a disaster, with the phone being unfit for purpose and never got upgraded past Android 1.6. I eventually got O2 to accept the phone back and swap me an HTC Desire. I passed this on to my mate Allan, and bought a Nexus One off ebay....

Ever since I have loved the Nexus One for its completeness and the fact it gets updated frequently.
Recently upgraded to Gingerbread 2.3 I had no plans to change until I was shopping with my wife this week and she 'casually' upgraded to a Galaxy S !
Boy did I notice how slick that phone was compared to the Nexus, not only that but the Phones4U bod let slip that they had just had stock of the Galaxy S2 arrive......

Dual Core CPU with 4.3 inch screen, it didnt matter I was gripped in tech envy, I had to upgrade (thankfully I was due an upgrade).
I threw caution to the wind and upgraded.

Long story short, its fffing fast with no delay in any situation.
The screen is enormous (maybe too big?)
My wife likes the TouchWiz interface (very iphone like) but I however much prefer vanilla android. I could have stuck with it, but the 4 'dock' icons really bugged me.

I was used to LauncherPro on the Nexus which allows a fully customisable dock, so I tried to install it but it wouldnt run!
Quick google search and it turns out that you need to run Home Switcher first..

then its simple to configure LP to have a snazzy scrollable dock and to arrange my app icons the way I want (5 columns)

whoop, I was made up, now back to matching what I had with my nexus.

Quick summary of my initial thoughts

Well made
very light
very thin
huge screen
no lag
apps install almost instantly
comes with gingerbread 2.3
i personally dont like touchwiz but iphone or new android users may like it. easy to work around it, and soon enough there will be plenty of roms released.
battery life seems ok so far
stacked with preloaded apps
apps list in touch wiz is annoying. adding widgets to screens is very slow in touchwiz, wheres launcher pro is much quicker.
front facing camera for skype

so my initial impressions are very encouraging, normally Id spend ages researching but this time ive jumped in.

Its going to be a year for dual core Android phones, but for now this phone really hits the spot.
Has Samsung reinstated my faith? Maybe
Will it get updated Android versions? Who knows!